mirror of
https://github.com/opsxcq/mirror-textfiles.com.git
synced 2025-08-08 06:56:30 +02:00
72 lines
2.9 KiB
Gherkin
72 lines
2.9 KiB
Gherkin
I just stumbled across this on your site. Here's a little
|
|
history about it, in case you are interested.
|
|
|
|
I was the one who had the idea to run this ad, and
|
|
both wrote the code and typeset the camera-ready
|
|
copy for the newspaper insertion. (We did this because
|
|
we felt that there was no way that the editors at the
|
|
Boston Globe would preserve the correct lisp
|
|
indentation which made the function more readable.)
|
|
|
|
We wanted to hire some Lisp programmers for
|
|
a project at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation
|
|
back then), and wanted the very fact of their
|
|
knowing what the name of the company was to
|
|
be a sort of pre-screening that they did indeed
|
|
understand a little about Lisp.
|
|
|
|
I constructed this ad so that the function would
|
|
only reveal the name of the company if you
|
|
evaluated a call to it with appropriate arguments
|
|
by extracting and combining pieces of the function
|
|
definition itself.
|
|
|
|
(The original version also constructed the phone
|
|
number out of pieces, but that both made the code
|
|
longer and more obscure, so in the end we decided
|
|
against it.)
|
|
|
|
While someone could have just typed it in to a
|
|
suitable PDP-10 installation running a suitable
|
|
version of MacLisp and run it with the appropriate
|
|
arguments, since such installations were pretty
|
|
rare it was much more likely that someone
|
|
would "evaluate it by hand" to find out the result
|
|
and if they succeeded, they were the sort of candidate
|
|
for whom we were looking.
|
|
|
|
One sticking point in getting the ad run was that the
|
|
corporate lawyers had decreed that the phrase
|
|
"Digital is an affirmative action employer" had to
|
|
appear at the bottom of every ad. It took a serious
|
|
amount of arguing to convince them that this would
|
|
defeat the purpose of the ad and that we could change
|
|
it to "We are an affirmative action employer."
|
|
Typesetting the ad was an effort in itself; Digital had
|
|
a brand-new typesetting program (this was long before
|
|
laser printers) called Typeset-10, but the program
|
|
and the photo typesetter (which was the size of a washing
|
|
machine and used photographic paper and chemicals)
|
|
were both finicky. It took a lot longer than I expected (on
|
|
the order of days) to get an acceptable typeset version
|
|
to be able to send to the newspaper.
|
|
|
|
We did get some responses to the ad and did interview
|
|
some candidates, but I don't recollect that we hired
|
|
anyone from it. One person called, said "It only works
|
|
interpreted" and hung up. He was referring to the fact that
|
|
MacLisp could compile functions as well as interpret
|
|
them, but those compiled functions couldn't manipulate
|
|
their own definitions the way the ad function did.
|
|
|
|
On a trip to the west coast years later, I saw a photocopy
|
|
of the ad pinned to a bulletin board. When I asked about
|
|
it I discovered that copies had circulated among Lisp
|
|
programmers but they (the ones I talked to at least) didn't
|
|
know the name of the company for which the ad was run.
|
|
|
|
Yours sincerely,
|
|
|
|
Kalman Reti
|
|
Ab Initio Software Corporation
|